Will I Notice The Difference In Performance (techy question)

[mabas9395]

Now that we are a multi-computer family and everyone seems to want access to the media files (photos, music, movies, etc) I am thinking about putting them all onto a NAS (network attached storage) device. These connect to the computers through the network connection (obviously). My question is if I currently have all my photos on an internal hard drive that I use when I edit them in Lightroom or Photoshop, am I going to notice a difference in performance when editing these files as Lightroom tries to access them on the NAS?

In other words, I believe the network connection to be slower than the SATA connection (correct me if I'm wrong) and if so will I see an impact to Lightroom? If so, are there things I can do to speed things up?


Thanks.

 

[MICKEY88]

not sure about the speed issue,

but if you have them on your hard drive, why not just copy to your nas, rather than move, that way you maintain your current speed, as well as having a backup copy in case of a drive failure..

this will also eliminate the possibility of someone else accidentally deleting any of your pictrues

 

[ChiSoxKeith]

Agreed. Keep your archive local and just put copies on your NAS for people to access.

Just from a purely technical standpoint....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

Serial ATA's slowest connection is 1.5 gigabits / second.

Most homes (unless you have really hot gear) are running 100 megabit wired connections (or even slowere wireless connections). So your access to the files will be slower and you will notice a performance hit.

 

[zackiedawg]

If you are running out of space and don't want to keep copies of the files on your internal drive, the other option would be to store them on the external network drives, but download them initially to the internal drive for working on them and processing, then move them when complete.

I like having multiple copies of my stuff, so I'd recommend backing up to a 2nd external drive, or having a networked or external harddrive RAID array. I'm personally happier when I've got two external RAID drives duplicating my internal drive PLUS copying all data files to an external portable drive every month or two. Could be I'm just a nervous nellie...but it makes me feel better having lots of copies and backups!

I'm at my harddrive limit now on my desktop, and need to upgrade soon anyway - 500GB seemed like so much 5 years ago! Now I'm figuring I need at least a 2TB internal - and fortunately already thought ahead with the twin RAID externals that are 2TB each...but my portable external data backup drive needs replacing too (250GB).

 

[Pineapple Whip]

<< Storage god... okay maybe demigod.

The answer lies in both the connection to and the amount of users that will hit the NAS disk at one time. The short answer is yes there will be a decrease in performance, but how much you notice it depends on a lot of things. As PP suggested, work on your primary storage and share a copy on the NAS device. I would not rely on these consumer NAS devices as your sole copy of any important data or memories.

Since disks are so high capacity these days, the money for a consumer class NAS device is better spent on beefing up your powerhouse computer to also serve files to others, essentially turning it into NAS. Depending on your budget and how you implement these parts, you can also improve your computer's overall performance and recoverability.

Watch out for "diskless NAS" which either requires you to purchase and add your own drive hardware, or will share out data on your existing networked computers' drives. The latter basically charge you to do something every current OS does natively. These look like a bargain at first.

 

[Groucho]

Yes, it will be slower. Probably frustratingly so. You can easily test this by putting some files on another PC on your network and access them that way.

Best thing to do, like others said, is keep them on your local PC in additional to a second location. Use something like SyncToy to keep up the redundancy.

I'm more of a mind to keep everything on one PC though. File serving doesn't take much processing power so you won't really notice it if someone else in the house plays an mp3 or video from your PC while you're using it (unless your PC is really slow anyway!) You can get 2tb drives for about $100 now.

If you have a device that streams audio/video to your TV, a standalone NAS box will not be super helpful, either - only supporting the most basic video formats. You'd need a PC running something like PS3 Media Server or TVersity to get better sharing to do good streaming. I generally have PS3 Media Server running all the time to stream oddball stuff to my PS3 (it works with any standard DLNA device) and file sharing to other PCs and old modded Xboxes running XBMC (which are getting too slow to play anything new.) I do have a second PC I use 95% as a NAS - but primarily because it still runs XP and I use it for my SCSI flatbed scanner, as I don't have any SCSI cards with Windows 7 drivers. If/when I buy a USB scanner, it will probably be retired.

The most important thing, of course, is backups - someone my wife knows had their house explode recently (!) and having a couple hard drives may be be much help then (without spending a big pile of money at Drivesavers to recover them.) Stories like that make me feel better about using Mozy; I've currently got 825 gigs backed up with them and it's climbing all the time. Their software now lets you also back up to a local drive, so you could use an external drive and recover from that if you have a hard drive failure and don't want to re-download a massive amount of data.

 

[photo_chick]

My NAS is pretty slow over my network. I started out using it so I could access my full library from all my computers, and I still use it for music and video that way (mine works very well to stream from to the PS3 and Xbox 360, as well as to my PC's and Mac but you do as mentioned need to make sure it supports the files). But it was too slow for my taste when opening files all the time so for my image library it serves as my primary backup.

To work with my image library on all my computers I got a 1TB external drive that I can easily take from computer to computer. Though I still have to pull from my NAS on the rare occasions I work on the old Mac here.

 

[MICKEY88]

if you decide to go with an external drive to free up space on your internal drive, I highly recomend getting a dock and using internal drives, externals are definitely slower than an internal drive., I added an esata card to my desktop, then got a dual dock with an esata connection, I keep 2 1 TB drives in the dock, the speed is amazing compared to a usb connection, and I can upload to one drive then copy over to the other so I have a backup copy

 

[mabas9395]

Interesting.

Sounds like the NAS idea isn't as brilliant as I thought. I'm sure my main computer is beefy enough to function as a file server so maybe I should explore that route.

A couple of questions though. I already tried setting up my computer as a file server but I ran into a couple of issues. 1st, I tried to make it easy for my kids to find their stuff so I have their computer mapped to some of my folders with an M drive for music, V drive for videos and stuff like that. Even though the mapping settings are at "reconnect at logon" their computer keeps loosing the drive mapping. My suspicion is that when my main computer goes into power save mode they loose the connection and then it takes a manual effort to reconnect. Any other ideas why the kids computer could keep loosing the network drive mapping even though there is a good wireless network connection? If my main computer is set up as a file server, I will probably need to disable any powersave/sleep/hybernate modes, right?

I'm also trying to set it up so that itunes on my kids computer can see all of our music and video files. It looks like it works. But when I use my computer to buy a new song, that file appears through the regular network drive, but itunes also makes a copy on the kid's computer C drive so I have duplicate copies of those songs on the 2nd computer. Is this an itunes Home Sharing setting I don't have correct or is it just the way it works?

Also, now that I have our home theater set up how I want it, I want a way to get our media files to stream to our TV. Most of the files are itunes music and videos (I ripped most of our DVD's to an ipod compatible format). What is the best way to get those to play on the TV. The kids are getting an xbox 360 for christmas and that has media streaming but are the file types compatible? (microsoft vs apple, i doubt it). Does this idea change the suggestions about how/where to store my media files? Do I need a dedicated "media server". I'm wondering if with the money I saved with everyone's suggestion to not get a NAS, to get the new AppleTV which should get all of my itunes media onto my TV, thoughts?

I think the general consensus is to keep my photo files local for best performance, that makes sense to me, so I'll go with that idea. So if I can get these other bugs worked out, I should be ready to go.

Thanks for all of your help.

 

[boBQuincy]

My NAS (which is really an older computer full of hard drives) has the same problems of (relatively) slow access but this should only be an issue when opening and closing the file. Any work done on the file should be handled on the "scratch" drive which is a good application for a SSD.

PS and LR often default to the C drive or the application installation drive, not usually the best choices for scratch drives. At the least we should have a partition set up just for the scratch drive and keep it defragmented for best performance. The SSD gave a nice improvement in speed.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I agree with the consensus that you'll find it annoyingly slower. As Bob said, you'll really notice the difference when you open and close a file and not while you are working on the file. Moving through lots of files is when it really hits you. Rendering previews at 1:1 helps a lot. Maybe I'll do some tests this weekend to see what the full render times are.

My process is to import from the CF card onto my SSD and with a backup onto the NAS (which is RAID 5, so it has some extra redundancy). I do an initial pass through the photos and delete the really bad ones. Once I am done processing them, I move the folder from my SSD to my primary drive system (a mirrored pair of normal hard drives). I also mirror that to my NAS and delete the original from the NAS. The orignal backup and the post processed files are on different shares on the NAS, so they don't get confused.

My NAS is a dedicated NAS by Infrant (now owned by NetGear). I'm pretty happy with it. Writes are quite slow. Reads are reasonably fast. I can watch two ripped Blu-rays on two different TVs without a problem. The rips are, of course, of my own peronsally authored Blu-rays because ripping commercial Blu-rays might be in violation of the DCMA. Every now and then I consider building a dedicated NAS based on a PC and some spare parts, but having an off-the-shelf one is so easy. No anti-virus stuff to worry about. No frequent patches. Built-in disk monitoring (which e-mails me if a disk starts having trouble or the box gets too warm). It also has built in streaming services for iTunes and DNLA. Upgrading storage is as easy as replacing the drives one at a time until all four larger drives are in place and synced up. I've migrated from 400GB to 750GB to 1TB to 1.5TB to 2TB drives without ever having to offload the data.

If I had to do it again, I'd look at the Drobo NAS. It looks pretty cool and can handle five drives in a RAID instead of just four. Despite having two NAS (one with four 2TB drives and the other with four 1.5TB drives), I'm always low on free space.

Totally aside from the NAS issue, you should think about putting a mirrored drive into each of your PCs. It's very easy to do. Extra drives are really cheap. If one drive fails, you still have a second. This doesn't replace backups because it doesn't protect you from file corruption, viruses, accidental deletes. It's jsut a cheap and easy way to protect you from physical drive failures.

 

[Pineapple Whip]

Interesting.

Sounds like the NAS idea isn't as brilliant as I thought. I'm sure my main computer is beefy enough to function as a file server so maybe I should explore that route.

A couple of questions though. I already tried setting up my computer as a file server but I ran into a couple of issues. 1st, I tried to make it easy for my kids to find their stuff so I have their computer mapped to some of my folders with an M drive for music, V drive for videos and stuff like that. Even though the mapping settings are at "reconnect at logon" their computer keeps loosing the drive mapping. My suspicion is that when my main computer goes into power save mode they loose the connection and then it takes a manual effort to reconnect. Any other ideas why the kids computer could keep loosing the network drive mapping even though there is a good wireless network connection? If my main computer is set up as a file server, I will probably need to disable any powersave/sleep/hybernate modes, right?

I'm also trying to set it up so that itunes on my kids computer can see all of our music and video files. It looks like it works. But when I use my computer to buy a new song, that file appears through the regular network drive, but itunes also makes a copy on the kid's computer C drive so I have duplicate copies of those songs on the 2nd computer. Is this an itunes Home Sharing setting I don't have correct or is it just the way it works?

Also, now that I have our home theater set up how I want it, I want a way to get our media files to stream to our TV. Most of the files are itunes music and videos (I ripped most of our DVD's to an ipod compatible format). What is the best way to get those to play on the TV. The kids are getting an xbox 360 for christmas and that has media streaming but are the file types compatible? (microsoft vs apple, i doubt it). Does this idea change the suggestions about how/where to store my media files? Do I need a dedicated "media server". I'm wondering if with the money I saved with everyone's suggestion to not get a NAS, to get the new AppleTV which should get all of my itunes media onto my TV, thoughts?

I think the general consensus is to keep my photo files local for best performance, that makes sense to me, so I'll go with that idea. So if I can get these other bugs worked out, I should be ready to go.

Thanks for all of your help.

Use a wired network card on the "server" and enable WOL (wake on lan) for the wired network card. Continue your power saving routine. If the computer is off and the kids' computer tries to connect to it, it will wake up.

ITunes sharing:
http://www.macinstruct.com/node/105

There are options to stream iTunes to the XBox, such as the one below, but I'm sure there are others.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/05/stream-your-itunes-library-to-an-xbox-360.ars

 

[zetachi]

Might I suggest an extra, low end PC with Windows home server installed?

I'm running mine on a Q6600 quad with 4 Gigs RAM (a bit overkill but thats my lowest extra system and 4.5 TB of HD space. WHS does automated PC back up on all my systems. When I import to Lightroom I have it do a copy to my main PC and copy to the WHS.

 

[Groucho]

There are also at least a couple free, unix-based NAS systems out there. These will perform similarly to the small standalone NAS boxes which are, I'd almost guarantee, running unix, probably Linux. I tried a couple, a Linux and a FreeBSD one. I was really hoping for the best as I love FreeBSD but the performance was clearly slower than Windows running on the same system, almost certainly due to them having to use SaMBa, which is kind of a hack to give connectivity to Windows PCs across the network and is not as optimized as MS's own SMB file sharing.

If you get an external drive, eSATA will give much better performance - basically, it'll be the same speed as an internal drive. If you don't have eSATA ports, you can get cheap adapters that convert an internal port to an eSATA and plug into an empty slot on the back of your case. Unfortunately, you pay a premium for eSATA. USB3 is also here now and is very, very fast, but not many things support it yet. (Vaguely related hint: if you have a DVR, you may be able to connect an eSATA drive to it for more storage - I have a 2tb drive connected to my DirecTV HR24, giving me ridiculous amounts of space.)

 

[GrillMouster]

Any time your computer needs to access the original files it will be slower via NAS than your internal drive. LR only needs the original files primarily for importing and exporting. For just about everything else Lightroom works with previews that are kept in its database, not the original files themselves. As long as you keep the Lightroom database on your faster local drive, it shouldn't matter that the original images are stored elsewhere. Having LR create 1:1 previews upon import will help minimize the need for LR to fetch the original files (for generating previews) while you're working. If you have LR auto-update sidecare or DNG files, that process would be a little slower if the files were on a NAS. At a bare minimum I'd make sure that both the NAS and the computer have a gigabit connection.

 

[pjacobi]

Use a wired network card on the "server" and enable WOL (wake on lan) for the wired network card. Continue your power saving routine. If the computer is off and the kids' computer tries to connect to it, it will wake up.

Ordinary LAN traffic will not trigger Wake-On-LAN event. You need a special program to send a specific "magic packet" to trigger Wake-On-LAN event.

Despite the name, WOL is not used to wake a sleeping system.

WOL is usually used to trigger a powered-off PC to power-on and boot. It is usually used by system administrator to push out a software update, without walking around the office and pushing power buttons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN


-Paul

 

[Pineapple Whip]

Ordinary LAN traffic will not trigger Wake-On-LAN event. You need a special program to send a specific "magic packet" to trigger Wake-On-LAN event.

Despite the name, WOL is not used to wake a sleeping system.

WOL is usually used to trigger a powered-off PC to power-on and boot. It is usually used by system administrator to push out a software update, without walking around the office and pushing power buttons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN


-Paul

<< Systems Administrator.

<<(and NAS demigod)​

Directed packet, read more.

The name, actually means it wakes the computer. That's why it's called wake-on-lan, otherwise it would be called somethingelse-on-lan. I'd explain it further, but you have a wiki.